The Aristocratic Miss Brewster by Joseph C. Lincoln

The Cummings house was not pure Colonial. Captain Dave had built it in 1895 and it bore the architectural stamp of the period. It was white, with green blinds, but it lacked the formal dignity of the Brewster house and aristocratic Wapatomac sniffed at the scroll-sawed ornamentation of its porch pillars and the colored glass windows at each side of its stained oak front door. Its situation, moreover, was not upon the exclusive section of the main road, but at the top of Nickerson's Hill, which rises above Scallop River near the Narrows. No ancient elms shaded its yard or screened it from the curious gaze of passers-by. There was a grove of pitch pine at its right and at the left the hill sloped sharply down to the cove and the buildings and wharves of D. Cummings & Co. House and barn and fences and outbuildings were neat and trim; they bore the stamp of self-respecting prosperity. A stranger, viewing them for the first time, might have guessed that their owner was a person who was comfortably well-to-do, who paid his bills and expected others to pay theirs, who took pride in his business and his home and the town he lived in. So guessing he would have guessed rightly. If he were very discerning he might have supplemented his guess by another, that the said owner, being a self-made man with ideas of his own, had built that house in accordance with those ideas and was perfectly satisfied with the result.

-"No, sir," said Captain David to the Ostable architect who had drawn the plans; "I don't want you to copy anybody else's house. If I wanted a two-hundred-year-old house I could have bought one; there's at least one for sale that I know of. I'm buildin' this house to live in and be comfortable in--to be myself in, as you might say. I'm not buildin' it to make believe be a Hathaway or a Carleton or a Brewster in. I like that kind of a front door and I'm goin' to have it. If I liked a blue one better I'd have that."